I know I said a great deal at the time, including all this. But go on and tell me what followed, how they received you when you flew down for the first time and what has befallen you now at their hands. When I sped off, father, I did not head for the Greeks straightway, but as it seemed to me the more difficult part of my task to educate and instruct the foreigners, I decided to do that first; the Greek world I let be, as possible to subject very easily and likely (I thought so, anyhow) to take the bridle and submit to the harness very soon. Making for the Indians to begin with, the most numerous population in the world, I had na difficulty about persuading them to come down off their elephants and associate with me. Consequently, a whole tribe, the Brahmans, who border upon the Nechraei and the Oxydracae,

The Nechraei are not mentioned elsewhere, unless, as Fritzsche suggests, they are the Nereae of Pliny (Nat. Hist., VI, 76). The Oxydracae made themselves famous by their resolute opposition to the invasion of Alexander; they lived in the Punjab.

are all enlisted under my command and not only live in accordance with my tenets, honoured by all their neighbours, but die a marvellous kind of death.

You mean the gymnosophists.

A generic name given by the Greeks to the holy men of India who lived naked.

Anyhow, I am told, among other things about them, that they ascend a very lofty pyre and endure cremation without any change in their outward appearance or their sitting position.

Apparently a correction of Peregrinus, where (p. 30) the position is spoken of as “lying.”

But that is nothing much. Just now, for example, at Olympia I saw the same sort of thing done, and very likely you too were there at the time when the old man was burned. I did not even go to Olympia, father, for fear of those detestable fellows whom I spoke of, since I saw many of them taking their way there in order to upbraid the assembled pilgrims and fill the back room of the temple with the noise of their howling.

The word is chosen because specially appropriate to Cynic “dogs.”

Consequently, I did not see how he died.

But to resume—after the Brahmans I went direct to Ethiopia, and then down to Egypt; and after associating with their priests and prophets and instructing them in religion, I departed for Babylon, to initiate Chaldeans and Magi; then from there to Scythia, and then to Thrace, where I conversed with Eumolpus and Orpheus, whom I sent in advance to Greece, one of them, Eumolpus, to give them the mysteries, as he had learned all about religion from me, and the other to win them over by the witchery of his music. Then I followed at once on their heels.

Just at first, on my arrival, the Greeks neither welcomed me very warmly nor shut the door in m face outright. But gradually, as I associated wit them, I attached to myself seven companions and pupils from among them all; then another from Samos, another from Ephesus, and one more from Abdera—only a few in all.

The seven were the Seven Sages, who as listed by Plato in the Protagoras (343 a) were Thales of Miletus, Pittacus of Mytilene, Bias of Priene, Solon of Athens, Cleobulus of Lindos, Myson of Chenae, and Chilon of Sparta; but Periander of Corinth was often included instead of Myson. The three whom Philosophy acquired later were Pythagoras of Samos,. Heraclitus of Ephesus, and Democritus of Abdera.

After them, the Sophist tribe somehow or other fastened themselves to my skirts. They were neither profoundly interested in my teaching nor altogether at variance, but like the Hippocentaur breed, something composite and mixed, astray in the interspace between quackery and philosophy, neither completely addicted to ignorance nor yet able to keep me envisioned with an intent gaze; being purblind, as it were, through their dim-sightedness they merely glimpsed at times an indistinct, dim presentment or shadow of me, yet thought they had discerned everything with accuracy. So there flared up among them that useless and superfluous “wisdom” of theirs, in their own opinion invincible—those clever, baffling, absurd replies and perplexing, mazy queries.